Monthly Archives: January 2008

Science is Cool!

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This is awesome news. I must admit to being a wee bit of a geek about cell workings. My favorite part of science class was drawing cell diagrams and I love finding out about the awesome things our cells can do. (Yes I am a dork, shut up).

A few years ago (in a botany class of all places. I have the world’s largest black thumb but for some reason I thought botany would be like a romantic Merchant ivory film where we spent hours drawing pretty pictures of plants and their parts. Instead we had to ACTUALLY GROW THINGS! I can’t do that.) I saw a film about how cancer and HIV are the flip sides of the same coin. Normal, healthy cells will kill themselves when they’ve outlived their usefulness. This is called Programed Cell Death. In cancer, the suicide mechanism gets shut off and the cells that should be dead build up into tumors. In HIV, cells that are healthy commit suicide for no reason. So it makes total sense that cancer and HIV research has a lot in common.

But HIV is a smart virus. It adapts so that drug therapy becomes less effective and it acts a bit like a cancer when it gets into microphage cells, making them live much longer than they are supposed too rather than killing them off so that there is always a residual pool of HIV in the body.

So along comes the drug miltefosine, which is already used to treat leishmaniasis, an parasite infection caused by sandfly bites. Miltefosine kills microphage cells and may work to deplete residual HIV pools. Because miltefosine is already approved for use in humans, testing can be fast tracked to see if it will work in HIV patients. Yay!

RQ Cooks plus how the poor get their party on

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So payday isn’t till Thursday and the fridge still hasn’t been restocked since our little electricity debacle. I’m scrounging around to keep us fed this week and resorted to the poor man’s meat- beans!

I have this awesome recipe for Cuban black bean soup, but I was missing one key ingredient- a large can of tomatoes. So I did what any good cook will do and improvised. I used a large can of enchilada sauce instead and it turned out quite tasty. I also skipped the sherry vinegar and a few other things cause I don’t follow directions well. Sue me.

So Cuban Black Bean Soup (spicy and vegan till you add the cheese- woot)

vegetable oil
1 pound black turtle beans, washed and picked over but not soaked
2 stalks of celery, diced
1 large yellow onion
2 carrots, diced
1 28oz can of enchilada sauce
2 bay leaves
pepper
salt
dash of favorite hot sauce (I like Tapatillo)
cheese, sour cream and/or chopped scallions for garnish

Preheat oven to 325. In a stock pot, sweat onions, celery and carrots in oil for about 3 minutes. Throw in enchilada sauce, beans, bay leaves and dash of hot sauce. Bring to boil. Cover pot and braise in oven for 2 hours.

Puree about 1/3 of the soup in a food processor (or if you have one of those handy immersion blenders, use that and know that I am JEALOUS AS ALL GET OUT)

Add salt and pepper to taste, garnish with cheese and scallions.

Now- how the poor get their party on.

Being friends with a whole bunch of poor struggling artsy types, we’ve decided to have a Soup Swap Party at my house next Saturday. Everyone brings a big pot of their fav soup and some take home containers. Then we all get together with some wine (okay a shitload of wine) and taste soups and take leftovers home so for the price of one meal we get many. I think I’m going to do Cheddar Chowder. It’s equal parts cheese, potatoes and bechamel sauce and 100 percent rich yummy goodness. I’ll post the recipe next week.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/fashion/24skin.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=06b6899885b3f203&ex=1201410000

Lisa D. Hull
Myth_Lisa@yahoo.com

“What does the Lord require of you but to do justice,
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)

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I don’t even know what the fuck this is

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Totally swiped from Sir Robin, the “If I was a book” quiz. I don’t know this book, have never heard of this book, and now I must read this book. Damn. Take the test and leave answers in comments. Unless i find some hapless soul who will let me abuse their computer, I’ll be gone from the internets till Monday afternoon.

You’re “Master Harold”… and the Boys!

by Athol Fugard

Even though you should have realized it for years, you’re only just
starting to understand how bad your society is. It’s been keeping some of your best
friends down for ages, and even you have been complicit with this system. When you
make a mess, someone else is quick to clean it. When you need help, someone else is
quick to your rescue. But when they point out injustice, you’ve pulled the wool over
your eyes. Until now. If you ever need a cast, it will be small.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Fuck You Nancy Pelosi!

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Thanks for once again shafting the poor in a rush to agree with the preznit. (Even more details here)

Thanks to a temp job last summer, our income for the year is at a whole whopping 69 percent of the poverty level. Who Hoo! Last year is was less than half the poverty level for 2 people, so I guess this is a step up.

People who make up to 130 percent of the poverty level are usually eligible for food stamps. You would think that anyone under the poverty level would just be eligible for the whole amount. It’s not like we can go spend food stamp money on beer and cigarettes or even toilet paper, it only pays for food.

So I am about 5000 dollars a year below the poverty line, or I am 416 dollars short every month of what the government says I need just to sustain basic life quality. They could just give that amount to me in food stamps. We could certainly use it and with some extra money we’d try these organics and whole grains everyone keeps talking about :).

But we don’t get that much.

Actually, for a family of 2 the maximum amount of food stamps we could get per month is 278. that would be nice, it might actually cover almost a months worth of groceries if we eat nothing but crap.

But we don’t get that much either.

We get 228 per month. It lasts about 2 weeks if we eat things like fruits and vegetables, whole grains and lean meats, nothing organic or expensive, just healthy. It lasts about 3 weeks if we eat processed crap and hamburger. The price of milk is over 4 bucks a gallon here most of the time, so things like cereal have become a luxury. While food prices rise with the cost of gasoline, food stamp allotments have remained stagnant.

I had a few hopes in the last week or so that the Dems were really going to stick to it and get help for the poor (since we are the first and last victims of recession, we see it coming way before anyone else and we feel it’s effects much longer) while getting a boost for the economy.

But nah. I guess it’s really easy to throw hungry children under the bus in the name of cooperation and bipartisanship. Nice work Nancy. When milk hits 5 bucks a gallon I’m telling my kid that you’re the reason a box of cereal is now as much of a rarity as lobster in our house. I hope the next time you bring a bite of either to you lips, you choke on it you disingenuous fuck wad.

Quick Note

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I finally found a therapy clinic that will take my insurance and had an intake appointment with them a week or so ago. From that appointment, they scheduled me with a therapist.

I just talked to my new therapist on the phone and OH MY GAWD- she sounds like she’s been drinking thorazine cocktails. She……………Just…………………Can’t………………..Get………………Words……………….Out………….Of……………….Her…………..Mouth

I’m fast and snarky. I can’t deal with a therapist who sounds more depressed than me.

Fuckles

Blog for choice day

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Today is Blog For Choice Day and I’m going to get all brave and overshare about why access to abortion without limits is important.

I am probably one of those women that the forced pregnancy wingnuts think “uses abortion as birth control”. I’ve had 3 and I have one kid. If I hadn’t had those abortions, I’d have 4 kids. I can barely support one, four would probably kill me.

I first got pregnant at 16 after having sex with my long term high school boyfriend. You could just attribute it to youthful stupidity, but…

When I was 16 my mother went into a mental hospital and I went to live with foster parents. They might have been nice enough people, but they were only taking me in so that it would look good on their application to adopt. As a foster kid, I had Medicaid but I had no access to a doctor without my foster parents help. I also had no money of my own, not an allowance or even lunch money that I could hoard up to pay Planned Parenthood for a birth control prescription. I got pregnant about a month after living with them.

With the help of my awesome school counselor, my boyfriend, his mom and his ex-girlfriend (weird, I know but she drove me and held my hand) I got the money together and a ride to the only clinic in a hundred mile radius. I never thought twice about having an abortion. I knew that I was too young and that there was no way I could give a kid up for adoption.

My foster parents found out about the pregnancy and abortion afterwards. They’d been suspicious that I was pregnant to begin with, what with all the puking. When I came clean and told them I had an abortion, they were very quiet. The next day they packed all my belongings into garbage bags and took off for Disneyland. A family friend stepped in when my evil social worker tried to send me to a “group home” that had just been in the papers because several girls had been stabbed there. Very soon after I was in Florida with Wonder’s family. Thank god I didn’t live in a state with parental notification laws. My foster parents would have been the ones with authority to consent.

I don’t know if the foster parents kicked me out because a teenage girl was too much to handle, or if they had hoped that I would decide to give them a baby I didn’t want. But even having all my stuff loaded into trash bags and the threat of group home violence were not enough to make me change my mind about having an abortion. Actually, it reinforced it. If the foster parents were the kind to give up on a kid so easily, they certainly were not the kind of people I wanted anywhere near a child of mine.

When I was 21 and the Kid was almost 2, I left his dad. His dad had gone from a hapless pot smoker to a crazy, possessive meth fiend who stalked me for months. I was still breastfeeding the kid and I hadn’t had a period in forever. I was very far along when I figured out I was pregnant. Almost too far along for an abortion (and perhaps I was too far along but the doctor was kind). I had been stalked, attacked, harassed and threatened for months. I had a protection order (civil) and a no contact order (criminal) against his dad. I could not see myself with one more tie to the guy and I had nearly died having the kid to begin with. If I did die, or even just became incapacitated having another child, I knew he would be all over my kid(s) and tormenting them in place of me. So I had a late term abortion at 24 weeks. I borrowed a shitload of money ($2400 if I recall correctly) that I worked off cleaning houses. I didn’t have childcare for my then 2 year old, so he went to clinic with me and a girl who I had just met at a domestic violence group counseling session. The clinic was in the city (I was in the suburbs) and without a driver there was no way I could have gotten there. A cab would have cost me 50 bucks easy. But I was lucky. There was a 15 year old girl there with both her parents who had driven 4 hours from another state. Thank god she had understanding parents. I don’t know if my 15 year old self could have made such arrangements.

The last one is the one that I beat myself up for, cause damn it, by now I should know better. Just to shorthand it- sex without condom, emergency contraception taken too late, found out about his wife and child when I told him I was pregnant. But I am here, in a wonderfully liberal city in a blue state. Medicaid covered the abortion . Actually, as soon as I became pregnant I became eligible for Medicaid and was covered within a few days of the positive test. I took a cab with a friend to the clinic which was only 2 miles from my house. I was well taken care of for little more than the cost of a cab ride.

So access to abortion AND birth control is obviously a big deal for me. I have exactly the number of children that I want. When people complain about the kind of women who use abortion as birth control, they mean people like me. For those of you who read this blog regularly, you know how hard I struggle with just one child who was very much wanted. Think about that next time the idea of abortion squicks you out. It is easy for us to be okay with abortion once, or if the mother has a significant sob story about her health or the health of the baby. But most abortions happen to women like me. All we have for justification is that it would ruin our lives and lives of our children. I think that is enough.

I don’t regret my choices, though they haven’t been easy. There were complications during the last abortion that made the whole thing a bit of a medical nightmare. But not enough for me to regret my choice. The second abortion was late enough to make me squeamish, but the result of having another child could have made me dead and my children abuse victims. The first one I sometimes forget that I had at all. 16 was exactly half a lifetime ago for me. I have many more years of fertility left, though I think that my 35th birthday present to myself is going to be a tubal ligation. In the mean time, I hope that anyone else who needs an abortion is as lucky as I have been in being able to get one. And I WILL NOT VOTE for anyone who who even hints at making abortions more difficult to get. I’ve been lucky so far, I think everyone who needs that kind of luck should be able to get it.

Update 8/18/09: If you are here from a certain forced pregnancy site link, then I suggest you read this. Then please crawl back in your slimey hate hole and try to keep feeling superior while knowing you could have helped a real, living child and instead choose hate and viciousness.

Things to think about in the dark

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I’ve had much quiet thinking time over the last few weeks and one thing I kept coming back to was why non-violent action only sometimes works to create social change. Since yesterday was MLK day and I think I’ve got a few things figured out, here goes.

Non-violent action works to bring about social changes only under very specific circumstances.

1) There MUST be sympathetic media coverage of the actors.
2) There must be a marked visual difference between the actors and the enforcers
3) You need an iconic image to rally people to the actors’ cause that both glorifies that actors and shames the enforcers at the same time.
4) Combination of media pressure and social pressure must be great enough to push the enforcers into retreat over a length of time. Short term actions will not be enough to change the course of society.

Let’s start with the images, cause they are what really gets this going.

The image is the thing. The most important thing. if you think back on successful non-violent actions of the past, you can probably pull some iconic images into you head with little thought: Gandhi in homespun white cotton, a flower in a machine gun, well dressed black kids on soda fountain stools, tiny Rosa Parks in her hat on the bus.

The image is necessary to hold the ideal of what is trying to be accomplished in the heads of people. Without it, the entire exercise is one whose point will be lost on the vast majority. They don’t care about the who, what, when or where. They need something that tugs on their conscious and sticks in their head when they close their eyes. They need to see the stark contrast between what is the status quo of the enforcers and what is possible from the actors.

News from the homefront

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Hello hello hello!

As Wonder pointed out, the lights are on but the computer is dead. If you’ve ever had an alternator go out on your car, then my compy problem will be familiar. As soon as the power was back, I started up the frankenputer. I got half way through typing an email to a hot French musician who is going to show me a museum or two in Paris when the thing just shut off. Each subsequent attempt to start the beast had it powering on for shorter and shorter spans and now it just turns on for half a second before dying.

It is not a Windows problem. I could get into the bios, but it still shut itself off. It is a hardware problem of some sort. So far i have replaced the battery on the motherboard, cleaned the cooling unit for the CPU, and tried to replace the power supply. No luck.

I also tried to take the ethernet card from an old computer and shove it into the Kid’s super craptastic computer (it won’t run XP) just so I could have internet access. No luck there either.

So I am without a computer at home. Considering the travesty that the last 2 months have been, it sucks but it isn’t going to break me.

In the mean time, we have light and heat and hot water. Oh yeah, HOT WATER. I have been taking long, luxurious baths every day in water hot enough to turn me pink.

Thank you everyone for your kindness and generosity. It means almost as much as a bath tub full of scalding hot bubbles. :)

…And There Was Much Rejoicing

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The lights are back on at the Red Queen’s Palace,(YAY!!!)  however, the Royal Computer-Thingy has been severely wounded, and is currently out of commission.  Problem with the power supply, she’s taken it apart and made valiant attempts to fix it, to no avail.

But she has Lights! and Heat! and a working stove!
So she’s happy about that.
She asked me to convey her thanks to everybody out there in readerland for all your support, and thoughts, and donations and all that cool stuff, and she’ll be back to posting as soon as she has a working computer available to type stuff on.